


who you know

by alamorn



Series: sudden moves [3]
Category: Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:00:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8153134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/pseuds/alamorn
Summary: When Waller tells them that Batman’s missing — with a pleased expression that says she knows exactly where he is — and they’ll be going to Gotham to keep the peace, everyone’s a little. Stunned.





	1. Chapter 1

The Squad’s been active for about a year when they get the news. None of them are exactly _happy_ with their situations: there’s still bombs in their necks, they’re still sent out to their almost certain deaths more frequently than anyone would ever be pleased about, and living in a supermax prison does not rate on the top ten places Floyd’s ever stayed. But they’ve settled a little, all of them. It’s not as bad as it was: the US government _is_ actually paying for Zoe to go to a nice private school, they’re all down a lifetime sentence already, it’s hardly solitary anymore with the amount of social time they get, and he’s got a good thing going with Harley. A really good thing.

So when Waller tells them that Batman’s missing — with a pleased expression that says she knows exactly where he is — and they’ll be going to Gotham to keep the peace, everyone’s a little. Stunned. He, Harley, and Waylon have all spent a good part of their criminal careers trying to kill Batman. The idea of helping him out is…not going to bring joy to Floyd’s heart anytime soon. Judging from Harley’s face and the low growl rumbling out of Waylon, they feel similarly.

“Question,” Floyd says. “We’re not good guys. We kill people, not save them.”

“I’m not hearing a question, Mr. Lawton.” Waller could freeze water by looking at it. Even after a year, he’s not used to how stone cold she is. Given his chosen profession, that’s saying something.

“What do you want _us_ to do?”

Waller isn’t a big woman, but she has a way of making everyone else feel small. It even works on Harley, and Floyd has never met anyone with as many issues with authority as Harley. So when she levels the full force of her glare on him, he’s not ashamed to back off. “You will capture any miscreants that attempt to take advantage of the Batman’s absence and they will be sent to Arkham Asylum for treatment and possible recruitment.”

Harley snorts, loudly. When Floyd looks at her, her jaw is set for a fight. “Capture? Arkham? That’s a real funny joke, ma’am.”

Watching Waller focus on Harley is hard. He wants to do something to take her attention off Harley, but Harley’s got something to say and she won’t be happy if he tries to stop her. So instead he braces for impact. And gets ready to grab Harley if she makes a lunge for Waller. “You have something to say?” Waller asks, head tilted as if she’s genuinely interested. It looks more like an owl, triangulating on a mouse blundering around below it.

“We’re not exactly known for non-lethal force,” Harley says, sounding more like the doctor she once was than the woman he knows. “Expecting us to make that switch is gonna be ineffective _and_ get us all killed. And I’ve eaten Swiss cheese more secure than Arkham, and I should know, ma’am. I’ve exploited it.” She’s got her feet shoulder distance apart and he can tell from the way she’s standing that she’s ready to move. Attack or run, he’s not sure, and he’s not sure if she knows either.

Everyone in the room is staring at Waller’s inscrutable face. You could hear a pin drop. After a long, tense moment, she smiles. On another person it would be a sneer, but he’s seen Waller sneer. It’s much scarier. “Very well, Ms. Quinzel. I am not opposed to the deaths of violent criminals. As these are your former associates you’ll be fighting, I’ll allow you to make your own judgments about capture or kill.” He doesn’t know about Harley, but his stomach drops at the reminder.

Not that he’s particularly close with any of the movers and shakers of Gotham’s underbelly. As someone who worked for money, the sheer nastiness of a lot of them has always struck him as distasteful. Harley looks mulish, but she’s not saying anything else.

Waller waits a few token seconds for any other concerns to be aired. When none are, she turns her back to them and strides away without so much as a nod of acknowledgement.

Flag doesn’t give them any time to recover, clapping his hands and herding them towards their equipment. They get twenty minutes to get ready. It’s not quite enough time for him to check all of his guns as well as he would like, but he drags his trunk over to Harley’s anyway. Expressing concern for her is always hard, complicated by her refusal to admit any sort of weakness in front of an audience.

Instead of saying anything she’ll take offense at, he taps her elbow with his own. When she looks at him, he raises his eyebrows.

“Aw, biscuit,” she says, “don’t you worry about little old me!”

“I never worry about you,” he lies. He wants to say something else, but it hits him that they’re headed to Gotham, for an extended period of time. Zoe’s still in Gotham, even if she’s going to the best school money can buy. He could see her. He glances at Flag under cover of checking that his wrist guns have bullets in the chamber.

No way Flag will just let him go. But Flag can be surprisingly understanding, for a glorified jailor. If the Squad were to distract him…

He’s not even sure Zoe will want to see him. She always seems happy enough, but there’s a difference between a planned visit and an unexpected drop in by your hitman daddy. Should he?

Harley touches his elbow and he realizes he was staring at Flag and grinding his jaw. Not a good look to direct at a man with control over the bomb in his neck. “Are _you_ okay?” she asks, the most baldly concerned he’s ever seen her. This mission has them all off balance.

He shakes himself a little. “Never better.”

“Liar.” She smiles as she says it, so he knows they’re good. Which is…good. Another issue on top of what they’re already dealing with would be too much.

 

The helicopter ride is tense. The three of them from Gotham are all pretty much vibrating with it. Harley’d started out by making bad jokes, but even she got tired of them and the lack of reaction pretty quick. Waylon’s twitching in ways that say he wants to be fighting already. Meanwhile, Chato, Digger, and Katana are all obviously hyperaware of the tension and have gone quiet. Not that Katana or Chato say much most of the time anyway.

In contrast, Flag’s determined to give them a rundown of the situation. Apparently, a number of metahumans and general evildoers are taking advantage of the lack of the Bat and there’s chaos everywhere. Zoe has to be safe, though. She’s in the good part of Gotham now, the rich white people part. The part the police actually care about.

Now he’s shifting nervously in his seat, too.

“The Maroni Crime family has made some dramatic moves since Batman disappeared. Bank robberies, a couple kidnappings, that sort of thing. None of the family is to be considered high priority for recruitment.” That’s the nicest kill order Floyd’s ever received. “As they have affected the widest area, they are our first priority.” He pauses for what would be a painfully long moment if the whole speech weren’t painful. “We are also receiving reports of a metahuman causing plant growth that is damaging to buildings and roads. She isn’t attacking anyone at the moment, but she’s caused severe traffic delays.”

Harley giggles next to him, quickly muffled. Flag lasers in on her anyway. “This funny to you?”

“No, sir!” Harley chirps and he remembers her talking about her friend who’s good with plants. The surprise brings him out of his funk for a second, long enough to have to hide a grin.

 

The helicopter lands on a Wayne building because apparently Wayne has the best helicopter pads and can be bullied by Waller. To be fair, Floyd’s not sure there exists a person or corporation that Waller _can’t_ bully. They’re hustled through the building by a harried looking woman in a pencil skirt. She manages to keep them out of sight of the general population of the tower, which is a skill he can admire.

Turns out there are tunnels connecting some of the Wayne buildings and subway terminals, so they get spat out pretty far from where they landed. Before they emerge from the station, which has to have been closed, because Floyd’s never seen one empty, Flag gives them all his best mean look, which wouldn’t scare a kitten, and says, “Try not to draw too much attention.”

No one even has a chance to point out how stupid of a sentence that was before Waylon starts laughing so hard he has to brace himself against the closest wall. He keeps laughing for a while, too, which gives Floyd time to notice that Flag’s uniform is not actually a uniform this time. It’s still combat ready, but there’s no identifying patches or insignia, and it’s not the same cut or color as any active duty forces Floyd’s familiar with. It still screams military, but not which.

The whole dark team thing the government can disavow has to be taken more seriously when they’re not in an evacuated disaster zone, apparently.

Waylon finally stops, gasping for breath. Flag looks like he regrets everything that led him to this point, standing in the middle of a subway station trying to tell a mutated crocodile man, a heavily tattooed metahuman, Harley Quinn, a girl with a sword and mask, and a black man in body armor with an arsenal strapped to his body to be inconspicuous. Somehow, Digger is the only one that could pass for a normal person on the street, and only until he opens his mouth.

Flag’s too proud to slump, but it sneaks into his voice. “Just do your best.”

Waylon flicks his velour hood up in the most insolent gesture Floyd’s ever seen in his _life_.


	2. Chapter 2

They make it two surprisingly empty blocks before they find out _why_ the blocks were so empty. Pam has turned Gotham’s tiny park into a massive forest, spilling trees and vines across the road, crawling up the buildings. Harley can’t even recognize most of the plants busting through concrete and steel, which means Pammy is using her own plants, which means she’s been planning this for a while and won’t want to be talked out of it.

Flag’s got that wide eyed look that means he’s trying to keep up his act as a cool, unaffected authority, but his hands are twitching for his gun. “Diablo,” he says, then pauses. Good. Harley doesn’t care much about property damage, but she doesn’t love the idea of fighting her friend in the middle of a fucking forest fire.

Floyd steps ahead and she takes a moment to appreciate the way he moves. He’s off put, obviously, but he’s good with bad situations. Ambushes, monsters, her. And she trusts him with point, unlike Flag, who she only trusts to not purposely try to get them all killed. She steps up beside him, hooks her hand over his shoulder to pull him down so she can whisper in his ear.

“Pammy’s an old friend. Lemme talk to her. You hear fighting, you come and get me.”

He casts a worried glance at her, but hey, at least she told him her plan. She doesn’t wait for him to say yes or no, but she strides away slow enough that he could stop her if he wanted. He doesn’t, and the trust in that settles her a little. Gotham’s thrown her off, bad enough that she’s pretty sure everyone’s noticed. She never expected to be here with the Squad, and ever since J — well, she never really wanted to come back, is all. Nothing in Gotham she wanted to see.

Getting into the new forest — jungle? — is like stepping into a different world, one where humans aren’t welcome. There are roots as tall as she is crushing cars on all sides, and the canopy is so thick that the air has a different quality. Dark and green. Even the air feels different, cool and somehow more moist. It reminds her of mountain retreats with her family when she was little, but only because that’s her only experience with nature on all sides. “Pammy?” she calls, fingers tapping on the bat slung over her shoulders.

There’s a rustle of leaves all around her, and then, “Harley?”

“The one and only! How ya doing, Pammy?”

Pam drops out of the canopy, lowered by a vine around her waist so that she lands gently. When she’s on her feet, the vine withdraws, Pam letting it run under her hand as it goes, like a dog. Despite the circumstances, it’s good to see her, and Harley doesn’t try to stop herself from smiling. Pam’s less happy, but Pam’s a hard person to make happy. Harley’d be suspicious too.

“What are you doing here, Harley?” She keeps about ten feet between them. “I thought you were dead.”

“Ha! Nothing on this planet that could take _me_ out, Pammy! But, uh.” She scratches the back of her head. “I’ve got an _employer_ now.” She makes a face. “And they want you to stop wrecking the city.”

Pam doesn’t snort. That sort of thing would be too crass for her, too human. What she does is stay totally still while her plants quiver around her. Harley doesn’t do anything so obvious as look around. No, she keeps her eyes locked on Pam’s, but she is exquisitely aware of thorns growing, of huge, brightly colored flowers unfurling.

She talks fast: “I can’t tell you much, but they’ve got a few of us under…” She touches her neck, lightly, before she can stop herself. A bomb in the neck is not the sort of news she wants getting out. She’s already telling Pam more than she wants anyone knowing about her current situation. “Contract. One of us is a meta with fire powers. We’ve killed some pretty big things. I know what you can do, but, Pammy, you’re not our priority. If you just don’t make more of a mess for a little while, let us pass right through, we won’t have to fight you.”

Slowly, Pam lifts her chin. “A mess?” Her voice is deadly quiet.

_Shit_. Harley shifts her hand on the grip of her bat so she’s ready to swing, shifts her weight so she’s ready to spring, tries not to look like she’s moved at all. “C’mon, Pammy,” she cajoles. She blanks on how to fix this, how to backpedal to a point where Pam won’t be offended. _Shit_. Threats it is. “If we fight, you’re gonna have to kill me, because if we win, you’re going to die or get recruited.” She swings her bat off her shoulder, leans it on the ground, touches her neck again, as obvious as she can. “You don’t wanna be recruited, Pammy, and I don’t wanna die.”

Pam thinks and thinks and thinks, still as stone, but the plants around her are shivering and quivering, pollen scattering yellow gold into the air, the rasp of plant on plant filling the silence between them. Harley rolls and bounces on the balls of her feet, checking the ground around her as subtly as she can for obstacles, fingers tap-tap-tapping on her bat, other hand clenched so tight she has to flex it deliberately.

Pam nods, once, and a vine snakes down and wraps around her waist, yanking her up into the canopy. Her voice floats down. “I’m glad you’re not dead, Harley.”

“Me too,” Harley mutters, and bounces back out to the Squad, pasting on a happy face. “Good news, guys! Gotham’s got a new park!”

Floyd scans her quickly, and focuses on her left hand. Oh. It’s bleeding, from how tight she was clenching her fist. She wipes it on her pants and makes a note to clean it at some point. If she forgets, Floyd’ll remind her anyway. “We got safe passage?” he asks.

“Sure do!” she chirps.

Floyd knows her, so he distracts Flag before he can give her shit, and lets her fade into the back of the squad. Tatsu gives her a look, or doesn’t. It can be hard to tell, with the mixture of the mask and the general inscrutability, but she doesn’t call Harley out, so it’s all good. Waylon’s still growling under his breath, so her conversational options are Chato or Digger.

She bumps shoulders with Chato as they enter tree cover. Before she can say anything, though, a vine wraps around her waist and yanks her straight up, dizzyingly fast. When she comes to a stop, head spinning and eyes out of focus, Pam is inches from her face.

“Everyone knows you did something to the Joker,” Pam says. “He killed a dozen men for nothing. If he hears you’re back…” She trails off, looking somewhere between concerned and indifferent. “Be careful.” With that, the vine drops her straight back down.

When it releases her, she stumbles and goes to her hands and knees and dry heaves. She doesn’t get motion sickness bad, but that was something else. And maybe — maybe she’s. Not afraid. But something like it.

Chato kneels next to her and pulls her hair back. He doesn’t say anything, which she’s pathetically grateful for.

Before she finishes, Floyd crouches in front of her and waits. When she’s done, she looks up at him. He’s got a look on his face — mouth a tight, stressed line, eyebrows furrowed. On top of everything else, he’s gotta be worried about Zoe, she realizes, and puts her hand on his knee. He puts his hand over hers. “What was that about?”

She squeezes his knee, forces a smile on her face, forces herself to her feet. “Just some girl talk. You know, clothes, boys, that sort of thing!”

He gets it pretty fast, and gets even tenser. Floyd’s good, though, and he doesn’t say anything incriminating. “As long as you two are done chatting.”

 

Flag’s intel includes the Maroni’s main strongholds and safe houses, so once they pass out of the tree cover they head for the closest location. It’s a bar, of course. Why would any organized criminals meet in a place without alcohol?

It’s a shitty bar, too. Flag’s saying something about staking them out and a surgical strike, but Harley is antsy, so she just walks in through the door, and says, “Hello, boys! I hear Sal Maroni licks dog turds. Is it true?” There’s at least ten guys staring at her, and none of them look drunk, unfortunately.

One guy takes offense and comes at her, but she hears another say, “That’s the Joker’s bitch,” so she just dodges the first guy’s sloppy swing and sends her bat whistling for the rude one’s face. It cracks satisfyingly across his temple, and he goes to the floor. The rest lurch to their feet, almost in unison, but not quite, and not quite neatly. So they have been drinking.

She grins.

Waylon crashes through the door and at the sounds of dismay, she grins wider. “Miss us?” she asks, and swings again.

It devolves from there, a flurry of fists and feet and the occasional bullet putting a mob member down for good. No one else follows her and Waylon in, which is perfectly fine. It’s odds she likes, especially with Floyd taking them out as she and Waylon put them down.

When corpses cover the floor she blows her hair out of her face and sends Waylon a stunning smile. The killing done has loosened her muscles and leached some of the tension from her bones. She doesn’t have the attention span to check the bodies or the back rooms, so she sticks her head out the door and waves the rest of the squad in as Waylon starts prowling the back rooms.

She hears a few short squawks as he discovers people, but no prolonged fighting, so she grabs a bottle of tequila from behind the bar, sits, and props her legs up on the closest table. Flag leads the squad in and she waves with one hand as she holds the bottle to her lips with the other.

The tequila burns down, but she’s had worse. And Flag looks pissed.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Yup, pissed. “We could have questioned them!”

She rolls her eyes and drinks again.

Floyd answers for her. “If you wanted a SEAL team, you should’ve brought a SEAL team.” He walks over to her, takes hold of her chin with two fingers and tilts her head this way and that, checking for damage. She bats her eyelashes at him. One of her eyes is already swelling from a lucky blow.

He swipes a thumb under it, gentle enough that it doesn’t hurt, just makes her feel seen, acknowledged.

Then he turns and listens to Flag rant and rave. It’s not quite as dramatic as some she’s seen, but she’s got a low tolerance for it right now. She sighs, pops some gum in her mouth, starts chewing loudly between slugs of tequila. Flag shoots a disgusted look at her, but he’s the only one who seems to notice. Tatsu is out of sight, sweeping the rooms behind Waylon, Digger following her like a puppy.

Chao joins Floyd as a human buffer between her and Flag, which is a level of — not compassion, they all bonded quickly enough that compassion doesn’t surprise her, but an awareness, of her needs, of each other’s weaknesses and how to compensate for them. And J tried to take her away from that. Will try again, if she knows him, which she likes to think she does.

Tatsu appears from back. “Clear,” she says.

Flag sighs, scrubs a hand down his face. “Alright, let’s hit the next one. This time with no _dramatics,_ Quinn.”

She blows a bubble until it pops.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly have no idea if this is good or not but I sure don't want to look at it anymore. If there's anything I think I should have warned for and didn't, please let me know. As always, I'd love to hear what questions you have, and what you'd like to see!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for torture of an intensity I think would still be PG-13, execution of someone who is not an innocent but is helpless, and references to stalking/possessive behavior.

Not a single cop has responded to any of the five locations where they’ve loudly taken out a Maroni hang out. Floyd knows that Gotham PD isn’t worth the air you use to call them, but he thought… Well. He had been holding out hope that the Bat was actually making a difference, that Zoe’s Gotham would be safer than the Gotham he grew up in. As he takes aim on Sal Maroni through a window a block away, he thinks about moving Zoe.

She won’t like it, but he could have Waller send her to a boarding school. That would get her out of the city and away from her mom and her mom’s dirtbag boyfriend all in one. Boarding schools are expensive, white people shit, but it would keep her safe and keep her away from any bad influences Gotham has to offer.

Sal Maroni is gesturing furiously and shouting, tiny in Floyd’s scope. He’s heard about his people being hit, obviously, but he’s not smart enough to get away from the windows. Floyd’s tempted to roll his eyes, but he just takes the shot. Sal crumples and Floyd methodically takes out the rest of the people he can, from this angle.

When he glances down at the street entrance as he gets ready to rappel down and join the Squad, he sees Waylon leading the charge, Harley close behind. Good. Harley’s been on edge since they got the assignment, but since her chat with the plant lady — Poison Ivy, he thinks her name is? What is with people and dramatic names? — she’s been past tense and well into self destructive. He hasn’t caught her scratching, but she’s thrown herself into every fight with enthusiasm above and beyond her normal love of violence.

So it’s a relief that Waylon is taking the lead for this hit.

He trots down the street, ducking into the building that is the Maroni base of operations. It’s unassuming, four stories, could be any small office in the world. The first few rooms he passes through are clear, a body or two at most spread out on the floor. One is still moaning, so he shoots the guy in the head and keeps moving, following the sounds of fighting.

He catches up fast. They’re stuck in a hallway with about fifteen gangsters. Stuck’s probably not the right word — Harley, at least, is having the time of her life, her nastiest smile on her face. Chato’s hanging back, which is for the best in an enclosed space. Waylon’s smashing two dudes together when Floyd enters the room, so he’s probably not unhappy about what’s happening. Katana is sliding through the melee like it’s some elaborately choreographed dance. Digger is not at his best in close quarters, but he’s hardly struggling, hanging back with Chato.

Floyd gets through the door as fast as possible, without drawing attention to himself. Harley may enjoy taunting kill zones, and Waylon may not even notice them, but Floyd is not either of them, so he slides through the door and drops five guys before any of them notice he’s there.

The gangsters aren’t using guns. That would make sense at first — with so many of them in such a small room, they’d have a higher chance of hitting each other than any of the Squad, but they’re hurting bad now. The space has opened up. But still, they don’t switch to anything more dangerous than knives.

He’s not one to question good luck, but they’re not even carrying guns. It seems wrong, sends a chill up his back.

Flag, on the other hand, is using his gun enthusiastically on anyone far enough from Harley and Waylon, so Floyd carefully does not sneak up on him.

“Hey Flag,” he says instead, waits for acknowledgement. When Flag waves him over, he goes easy enough. “Why aren’t they using guns?”

“You noticed too?” Flag lowers his gun, since the only remaining gangsters are in Harley’s path of destruction. He shakes his head, and they watch as she destroys a grown man with nothing more than a baseball bat. “No clue. None of them have even had a gun on them. Just knives and zip ties.”

“Zip ties?” The feeling gets worse, spreads from his back to every inch of skin. Floyd trusts his instincts. They’ve kept him alive in a very dangerous line of work. Every bit of this makes him unhappy. “Who’re they trying to get?”

A muscle jumps in Flag’s jaw instead of anything so revealing as a shrug. “Not a one of them has had a chance to make a move. Your girlfriend’s keeping them all on defensive, pretty much by herself.”

The word “girlfriend” in Flag’s mouth, referring to Harley, gives Floyd a bad feeling for an entirely different reason. They knew there was no way to keep their relationship secret, not with the amount of scrutiny they’re under at all times, but to have it openly acknowledged makes it feel like a weakness to be exploited. Floyd’s worked hard not to have gaps in his armor this large. Worked for years.

Harley is not a weakness, he reassures himself. Harley does not make him weak.

He’s been quiet a little too long. Flag shoots him a sideways look, but luckily doesn’t say anything. “She’s not letting Waylon take lead?”

Flag scoffs. As they watch, Harley cracks the last man’s skull. She hits him a few more times than necessary, but no one stops her. None of them pretend to be good people. “Not since we figured out they’re not carrying guns.”

When Harley keeps beating the guy, skull going soft in a way that’s sickening to watch, Floyd steps forward. “Harls, I think he’s dead.”

She stops, but it takes her a moment to focus on him. She blows her hair out of her face. “Can’t be too careful!” she chirps and skips to the door at the end of the hallway.

She opens it before he can stop her, but it’s just an empty staircase. When they get to floor two, Harley doesn’t even pause before continuing up. Floyd goes with her, with a single backwards glance. Flag swears and directs Katana to take Chato and clear the second floor before following.

At the third floor, Harley keeps heading up. Floyd follows, but Flag, Waylon, and Digger peel off to clear the floor. 

When they get to the fourth floor, Harley leads him to Sal Maroni like she knows the building, like she knows the man. When he tries to ask about it — “Harley, what’s going on? How do you know where you’re going?” — she ignores him completely. Before she can push open the door that he knows leads to Sal Maroni and his best men, he grabs her by the elbow, a little harder than he meant. She looks at his hand and he loosens the grip. 

“Harley, what the hell?”

She bounces on the balls of her feet, moves her arm, not to knock his hand away but to grasp his forearm with her own hand. “I — if I’m right, you’ll find out in a second. If I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter anyway, okay?”

She looks desperately unhappy, which Floyd’s honestly going to count as a victory. She’s admitting there’s something wrong, she’s not brushing him off. “Alright,” he says.

“Alright?” she says, thrown off balance.

He nods. “I trust you, Harls.”

She looks so poleaxed that he tilts her chin up and brushes a kiss across her lips, then steps back. “You want to do the honors?”

She blinks hard and grins at him, a more honest look than the one she’s been sporting. “Aw, biscuit, you know me so well.” She kicks the door open.

He glances at the door jam as he follows her, shakes his head. She’s not a true metahuman, but she’s definitely stronger than she should be. Something the Joker did to her, maybe? She doesn’t talk about her time with him if she can avoid it, but he knows a lot of fucked up shit happened.

He’d cleared the room pretty well from his sniper perch, and the people he hadn’t been able to kill seem to have cleared out. Luckily they left Sal Maroni. Seems he didn’t inspire much loyalty. He’s dragged himself to a seated position against the wall, under the window Floyd shot through. He’s also tied a tourniquet around his upper thigh, which is a bad move if he expects to live through the day. He’s not going to, but it’s still bad first aid.

He’s away from the bodies, so Harley has plenty of space to drop into a crouch in front of him, arms slung over her knees. She looks almost friendly, except she’s got a few too many teeth showing for it to be totally convincing. Maroni’s not convinced, and he’s groping for a gun he doesn’t have.

“Hiya, Sal,” she says. “You know, I’ve been missing good old organized crime, lately. Lotsa big monsters, more radioactivity than I ever thought I’d be in close quarters with, not a ton of plain old enterprising criminals. And ya know what, Sal? Plain old criminals are a lot more fun. Now, are you gonna tell me why my reliable organized criminals aren’t carrying guns, or am I gonna have to get mean?”

He laughs in her face. Floyd takes a step forward. “You mean you don’t _know_?” Maroni says. “Oh, you poor, stupid bitch, you’re so fucked.”

She shrugs and plants the end of her bat firmly on the bullet wound in his thigh. Then she _leans_. He holds back the scream for a moment, panting and sweating, but she keeps leaning until it bursts out of him.

“Your boyfriend wants you back!” She takes the pressure off and he takes a moment to recover, breathing hard.

“He does?” Harley asks, sounding remarkably unaffected. She casts a glance back at Floyd. “You want me back, biscuit? I didn’t realize you missed me!”

Maroni laughs, an ugly sound. “Oh, you’re dead,” he says to Floyd. “And you,” he says to Harley, “he’s gonna make _you_ suffer.”

Floyd shifts uneasily and Harley sighs, exaggeratedly loud, and jams her bat against the hole in his thigh once more. Maroni _screams_ , high pitched and animal. Looking curiously detached, Harley keeps the pressure up until he starts crying, tears poring down his cheeks. “That’s not very nice,” she says, sing song, over Maroni’s litany of curses. “Now, are you gonna say anything useful, or are you gonna keep wasting my time?”

“He wants you back! Alive!” Maroni’s on the verge of hyperventilating. “He said anyone that hurt you would — no one’s allowed to use a gun with you around.” He starts laughing, manic and mean. “I wouldn’t want to be you for the world.”

Harley heaves a disaffected sigh, stands, pulls her gun, and shoots him in the head, all in one smooth motion. When she turns back to Floyd, there’s a hint of blood spray on her face, and she’s still and solemn. He hates to see her this way, but his first concern is Zoe.

Harley can take care of herself, and she’s got the Squad as backup. The Joker — he’s more than a physical threat to Harley, and Floyd wants to be there for her, but the Joker has a reputation for hostages. If he knows they’re together, and he knows Floyd has a kid — if Zoe gets hurt, he’ll never forgive himself.

He should check in with Harley, but the sudden panic of a threat to Zoe overwhelms him. How can he check on her? Sneak away? That would be almost impossible, and could bring attention to Zoe if the Joker _doesn’t_ know about her. Would Flag be willing to call the house, check on her? But there’s no guarantee that any report given over the phone would be accurate.

Harley stops in front of him. She looks exhausted. She starts to reach for him, then lets her hand drop. He catches it and twines their fingers. “You’re worried,” she says. “About Zoe.” She doesn’t wait for him to respond, just nods to herself. “You’re right to be. I’ll stop him, Floyd, you don’t have to worry about that. I’ll stop him.”

He squeezes her hand gently, overwhelmed suddenly. This probably isn’t the worst day of her life, but it’s got to rate up there, and she’s taking the time to look at it from his perspective. They haven’t said _love_ yet, but if he wasn’t sure before, he is now. “Not by yourself, you won’t.”

She releases a great trembling breath and sways forward to rest her forehead against his chest.

They wait that way for the rest of the Squad to find them. Harley breathes slowly, regularly, and Floyd runs through plan after plan for how to make sure Zoe doesn’t get hurt, no matter how this goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://www.tumblr.alamorn.com)! 
> 
> I'm taking prompts right now jsyk!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for human trafficking, implications of sex trafficking.

Someone smarter, someone calmer, would have gotten more information out of Sal before they killed him, would have figured out where to look, where to start, but it wasn’t someone else, it was her. And Floyd didn’t stop her, because Floyd trusts her, he knows her. Maybe he shouldn’t trust her, because that was _so stupid_ , but there’s an iron band around her ribs and it only loosens when she looks at him.

Flag shepherds them out of the room she killed Sal Maroni in so they don’t have to have this conversation over dead bodies. She’s not sure why, honestly. No one’s squeamish.

But he makes them stand in the empty hallway — Tatsu leans against the wall, Digger sits on the floor next to her, Floyd is a steady presence at her shoulder, and after a moment, Waylon and Chato sit opposite Tatsu and Digger — and gets in her face. “Want to tell us what the hell you were _thinking_ , Quinn?”

She’s never impressed with macho bullshit, but right now, there’s little she wants to deal with less. She’s got a sudden empathy with trapped animals. And like a trapped animal, she bears her teeth. “He didn’t have anything important to _say_ , Flag! And besides,” she snaps her teeth in frustration, “who told you I could _think_?”

Floyd grabs her wrist, grip loose but unmistakeable. Grounding, and keeping her from attacking Flag. She wants to whirl and stalk away, leave Flag and his questions and his posturing far behind, but— there is still a bomb in her neck. The Joker wants to get her back. Ha. She’s running on adrenaline, can’t remember the last time she ate. If she runs off now, Flag blowing her head off is the best possible ending. She turns her hand, grips Floyd’s wrist right back, backs down. He releases her when she releases him.

Surly, she says, “He wasn’t gonna say much anyway.”

Flag sighs explosively, but he seems to have picked up on the mood because he doesn’t push it harder. “You could have let me be the judge of that.”

“He _didn’t_ have much to say,” Floyd cuts in, firm. “And I’ll tell you what he _did_ have to say once we’ve gotten some food. It’s been seven hours since we dropped here. And I, for one, want something that’s not protein bars.”

There’s a rumble of agreement, including Tatsu. Everyone’s drooping a little, except her. The only reason Harley isn’t wilting around the edges like the rest of them is that every inch of her feels like static shock, like white noise. She’s buzzing, frantic, on the edge of a panic attack.

 

Flag agrees to a meal break. They go to a street cart in East End, since it’s close and it’s an area they don’t expect to run into anyone to fight without looking. The halal vendor is wide eyed, but serves them without asking more than how spicy they want each item.

They chow down on their street meat, perched in window ledges. It feels weird, and looks weird too, if the stares of passersby count for anything. She can’t remember the last time she got food from a cart. Definitely back when she went by Harleen, but her mom had been against street food for reasons of image as much as health concerns. She’s certainly never gotten street meat with as motley a group as the Squad.

A woman stops in front of them, neatly dressed, short dark hair. Harley’s about to say something to keep her moving, but something about the way she moves makes Harley pause. Or doesn’t move, rather. Most people aren’t capable of that kind of stillness. Harley tilts her head and decides to wait it out.

The woman smiles. “You’ve made quite a splash today.” She doesn’t focus on any one of them in particular, letting her eyes skid across all of them. She only pauses a little longer on Waylon than the rest of them, which is what convinces Harley. Who is she? Harley’s never been good with names, and she’s pretty sure she’s never seen this woman’s face before.

Normally, Harley would be the one to respond, friendly and forward, putting this stranger on the defense and breaking the awkwardness, but she’s less than half here. Most of her mind is stuck: _Does he know about Floyd? Did he know we would come here? What’s he planning? How long has he been planning? Is Zoe safe? What can we do to make her safe?_

Fortunately, the woman doesn’t seem to need anyone to talk back to her. She keeps her eyes moving across them, making sure they’re all listening. “But not as much of a splash as the human traffickers kidnapping girls the past few days. They had funnier costumes than you guys, too.” Everyone tenses. “Easy to track.” A thin, mirthless smile. “Hard to hide that many girls without making a fuss. The Old Gotham Subway might be interesting to tourists like yourselves.” Harley scoffs quietly. The woman meets her eyes at that, and the smile becomes a little more — not honest, but, something close to it. A sharp tooth shows for a second.

“How do we know your information is any good?” Flag asks, but it seems more like a formality than any actual doubt.

The woman lets her mouth settle into that thin smile once more. “Come to the Bowery and see for yourself. It might be a bit of wait, though. They don’t exactly keep a schedule. And someone,” her smile becomes razor sharp, “has made their displeasure clear. They’re a little more cautious now.”

Flag manages to be a reasonable human being instead of a soldier for five seconds, and just nods. “Thanks for the heads up.”

The woman nods and turns, disappearing into the street in a way that should have been impossible. Flag sighs. “Guess we know where we’re headed next.”

Harley hadn’t thought her stomach could get any tighter, but it does. Why’s J in trafficking? What’s he _doing_? She wants to run, which is an alien feeling, and as impossible to carry out as to reconcile. She can imagine the explosion vividly. Floyd settles a hand over her clenched fist. It startles her, which is a bad sign, but once she’s breathing again she turns her hand and interlaces their fingers.

“Do you know what you want to do about Zoe?” she murmurs.

The corners of his mouth twitch unhappily, not quite a frown, but expressive all the same. “Can’t think of anything that doesn’t get me killed, put her in more danger, or leave me worrying.”

She makes a soft noise and tips her head against his shoulder so he can talk right into her ear.

“Option one, I sneak away, Flag blows my head. Option two, I sneak away, you distract him, I draw attention to her, and maybe Flag blows my head. Option three, I tell Flag and he lets me visit — draws attention and it’s not gonna happen. Option four, I convince him that we swing by that way before we stake out the Bowery, but we’re already in East End, there’s no reason to go all the way to Old Gotham, and that draws a huge amount of attention. Option five, I make a call, somehow? But unless I see her safe…” He trails off, sounding tired.

Harley squeezes his hand and thinks. He’s thought it through pretty well. She can’t think of an obvious answer that he’s missed. And she can’t even offer to go for him, because she’s on just as short a leash as he is, and Zoe doesn’t know her anyway. Which…she would like to meet Zoe, but this is hardly the time. “She goes to school in the Diamond District, right?”

“Only the best for my baby,” he says, obviously proud.

“I know you don’t trust her mom, but do you trust the school? Is it still school hours?”

He pauses for a while. “I trust the school _slightly_ more than her mother, and I…don’t…know. When do fancy private schools get out? It’s almost four, that seems…late?”

She shrugs. “It was an idea, never said it was a good one.”

He huffs, mildly amused. “Gotta start somewhere. Anything else?”

“She’d be reported if she went missing, if she’s going to school in the Diamond District. There’d be an Amber Alert, even here.” She hesitates a long time, then rushes forward with it. “No news might be the best news you can get, right now.”

She can feel how tense and stiff he is, along the line of her body, but he takes a few deep breaths and slowly, deliberately relaxes. “You might be right.” He makes a noise that could be mistaken for humor by someone who didn’t know him, and probably had a death wish. “After we get out of this mess, I’m demanding a week with her, _and_ I’m gonna send her to a school outside of Gotham.”

She brushes her thumb over the knuckle she can reach. Anything she could say would be a platitude, so she kisses his cheek and tunes back in to the rest of the Squad’s discussion.

They seem to mostly be arguing about how to stake out the Bowery. It’s not the biggest neighborhood in Gotham, and at least it’s not the whole East End, but it’s still a lot of space to cover with seven people, especially when five aren’t exactly the most trustworthy.

To be fair, most of the arguing is Flag with himself. Digger occasionally comments in a way that makes it take longer, but everyone else seems content to watch Flag look at a city map on his phone and swear under his breath.

“We could start out in Crime Alley — stay on the roof of the Park Row Theater —and move south, but Crime Alley is where the most undefended girls are,” Harley chimes in after a long moment of watching Flag squint. He whips his head up to stare at her, a vaguely wild eyed look.

“You couldn’t have said that earlier?” he demands.

“You’re always telling me to be quiet, Flagsy!” she deflects. “I just want you to be happy!”

He scoffs, loudly, and looks almost surprised that he made the noise. “Lead the way, Quinn.”

Yeah, that’s why she doesn’t help him out. She’s not looking for _responsibility_ or a _leadership position_. She’s more than happy to leave that shit to Floyd. Harley likes to be powerful in and of herself. She likes to have a strong body. She likes to have a reputation that makes people jumpy. She _doesn’t_ like being in charge of other people or their well being. Respect for human life is not a natural instinct for her.

Still, she takes them to Park Row Theater with only minimum complaining. Alone, or with Tatsu and Floyd, getting to the roof would have been no issue. Even Flag could have gotten up without too much trouble. But Chato and Digger aren’t used to climbing in the same way, since the fire escape is old and rusted out and there’s a lot more clinging to the wall and the paracord she tossed down as a support and guide than she thinks anyone was expecting. Still, they could have gotten up with only a little trouble. It’s Waylon that’s the problem.

He’s too big and not meant for climbing. She’s seen him swim — he’s an enormously capable individual, but he doesn’t have great manual dexterity, and even if he weren’t too heavy for some of the weight bearing areas, his hands and feet are too big to fit in the grips easily.

They try everything — getting him on the fire escape yields a terrifying groaning noise as old bolts and screws start to either sheer through or pull out of the wall. Having him climb up the wall like she did just dumps him on his ass. Tying the rope to his waist and trying to pull him up as a Squad makes the rope cut into him so bad he cuts it and thumps back the few feet to the ground.

After that humiliating experiment, Flag says, “Katana, go back down and keep an eye on him. Try to hide out.” At the flat look she levels at him — Harley giggles — he sighs and says, “I don’t _know_ how, figure it out.”

Tatsu actually manages pretty well. They end up hunkered behind a dumpster, which is unfortunate for them obviously, but they’re hard to see even when you know they’re there. Harley’s impressed.

They settle in to wait. Harley wants to nap — she’s exhausted, and nothing’s going to happen soon, but it’s not going to happen, not with her blood feeling fizzy. Floyd does take the opportunity, propped up next to her. If he’s actually asleep, she’ll eat her own bat, but he’s got his eyes closed and is breathing slowly. Digger does the same, a bit farther away, and she, Flag, and Chato stay wary. Or as wary as it’s possible to be, anyway.

They’re awake, okay. She plays cards with Chato, quietly, while Flag makes disapproving faces.

As it starts to get a little later, the Alley starts to fill with all the people that work it, whether they’re selling sex or knock offs or drugs, picking pockets or pulling guns.

Crime Alley is a busy place, but even with the Bat missing in action, no one touches the Wayne Memorial. The flowers are older than Harley’s ever seen them, but they’re still given a shallow berth.

After another hour, Floyd makes her lay there with her eyes closed, says that even if she doesn’t sleep it’ll help her feel better. Mostly, it helps her think of all the ways this can go wrong, of how much she has to lose, now that she loves someone with things to lose. Luckily, it’s not long after that, that they hear a commotion in Crime Alley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All location names in Gotham are pulled from the Gotham City wiki page. Believe me, I would have come up with a better name than "Crime Alley."
> 
> Anyway, sorry for the wait, and a reminder to come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://www.alamorn.tumblr.com)!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for violence, mostly non-graphic, sexist talk. I genuinely can't think if there's anything else I should warn for? Let me know if I've missed anything, but this chapter has fried my brain.

The clowns in the alley aren’t wearing the mascot suits the Joker usually forces his lackeys into. Instead they’re wearing Halloween masks — a bunny, a tiger, a dog. Floyd’s never seen the point of that — it has to cut visibility badly and a man in a mask with a gun is not significantly scarier than a man with a gun. But he doesn’t see the point in any of the Joker’s affectations. Give him a gun and a place to stand and he can change the world. Anything more just seems wasteful.

But all that goes out of his head when they grab a girl — woman? — who looks like Zoe. Or, she doesn’t, really. The only thing they have in common is brown skin and a certain softness around the eyes. One of the pickpockets. One of the prettiest in the alley.

He swings around, bringing his gun to bear on rabbit-mask, but before he can shoot, Harley puts her hand on his arm.

“We have to follow them.” There are shadows under her eyes.

He’s not feeling as sympathetic as he might. “Can follow one as easy as three.”

Harley tilts her head at that, takes her hand off his arm. “Can’t argue with that.”

The angle is bad, but Floyd’s taken harder shots and made them cleanly. This one is no different. The girl gets covered in blood and bone, screams, but she gets away. The second rabbit-mask dies she disappears, fast enough that even Floyd’s impressed.

Tiger-mask and dog-mask crouch and start looking for the shooter. Flag swears under his breath and crawls over to Floyd. Floyd spares him a look as he lines up the next shot. He wishes he hadn’t — Flag looks furious. Floyd takes the next shot before Flag can say anything to stop him.

“Motherfucker,” Flag spits. “Stop killing them, we need to follow them.”

“I left you one,” Floyd says, and something in his tone makes Flag rear back a little, but not, unfortunately, back off.

“Now they’re gonna _know_ they’re being followed. They’re gonna act different because of it. If we can’t follow them back to their _fucking_ old subway hideout, it’s _your_ fault. And that includes all the girls they’ve already snatched.”

Floyd clenches his jaw, keeps his eyes on dog-mask. He’s running, no new hostages. Harley backs up and leaps the gap between buildings as they stare at each other. In pursuit. Flag starts swearing under his breath and hasn’t stopped by the time he takes his own flying leap. Katana melts out of the shadows, Waylon close behind, and starts moving on the ground. Floyd takes a moment just to breathe, lets Chato and Digger make their own jumps before he starts the chase.

On the roofs, Harley’s doing all the hard work. The rest of them just have to keep her in sight. And his girl is a lot of things, but subtle is not one of them, so it’s not hard. Floyd feels viciously triumphant even as his knees start to ache almost immediately. He hasn’t treated his body kindly enough over the years to do a prolonged chases with any sort of grace. As a neighborhood, the Bowery has nothing to recommend it; even if it weren’t poverty stricken and crime riddled, the buildings are so crowded together that there’s no natural light half the time, and a ridiculous number of them are empty and decaying. As a place to live, the Bowery is among the worst. As a place to run a pursuit across the rooftops, it’s as close to ideal as there is in Gotham.

As the crow flies, they probably only go a mile. Following the path dog-mask takes, it’s closer to two. The rest of the Squad is clustered on the edge of a building, Digger straggling in only just before Floyd gets there. When he glances over the edge, Katana is standing in front of the door, and Waylon is half way down the block and steadily trotting towards her.

“He went in here,” Harley says, when he stops. He brushes her fingers with his. She looks a little less pinched. “I only know a little bit of the tunnels — they weren’t our main base back then. But they’re trapped all to shit.”

“Tell me about the traps,” Flag demands.

“Coulda said please.” She makes a motion that should be an eye roll, a shrug. Instead, it’s a flinch. “I dunno much. They’re not — J’s. Or mine. Mostly. There’s been a lot of people down there over the years.”

“Of course,” Flag says, while he starts looking for a way to climb down. “Why would anything ever be easy?” Seeing nothing easy, he loops paracord around one of the gargoyles that proliferates in Gotham. “A job that starts with blackmail is never going to go smooth.” He tests his weight. The gargoyle holds. “You’re such a good soldier, Rick. We want to reward you for service, Rick.” Still muttering, he climbs over the edge and starts his descent.

They watch that in silence for a moment, then Digger says, “D’you reckon he knew we could hear him?”

That startles a laugh out of the rest of them. “Well,” Digger continues, “I hate to agree with Flag. Principal, you know.” (“You don’t even know what principal is,” Floyd says.) “But I gotta admit, man has a point.” With that, he shakes his head as if embarrassed, then starts his own climb down.

Chato looks pained, as much as he ever looks anything. “If I fall,” he says and stops, shakes his head.

Harley jumps in. “Aw, Chato, a bomb didn’t do anything to you, a measly twenty foot fall’s nothing!”

For some reason, that doesn’t seem to make him feel any better. Much as Floyd loves Harley, and he really does, has since embarrassingly early on, if he’s honest, her talents do not lie in reassurance. Chato just shakes his head and cautiously heads over the edge of the roof. He goes down slower than the other two, and Harley turns towards him, something about her body language putting him in mind of a small animal, abused and afraid. Without an audience, there’s no mistaking the naked panic in her eyes. It hits him, then. He keeps thinking of this as something he has to deal with alone, maybe with a little help from the Squad, but more incidental than purposeful. And he’s been so aware of Harley’s struggle — despite the way she keeps reaching out to him, he’d been. Not brushing it off, but not registering it. Not comprehending that she was offering both understanding and support. 

He’s not doing this alone. He has a partner, now.

“Floyd,” she says, “I’m so sorry, you gotta be going crazy about Zoe, and I just want you to know I won’t let him —“

“Harley,” he says, softly. She trails off. “Harley. I know.” He presses a kiss to her forehead. “Thank you.”

There’s a thump from below as Chato lands. Without pulling away, Floyd says, “Ladies first.”

“Oh no,” she says, with a wicked smile. “Age before beauty.”

“Why you gotta hurt me like that,” he grumbles, good natured, as he grasps the paracord. He’s grateful for his gloves. Thin as this stuff is, it still cuts into his hands through them. Getting over the edge is the awkward part. He’s not trying to do a flying leap, so he has to hop backwards over the edge. From there it’s easy, just letting himself bounce down using his legs against the wall for balance.

When he’s down, Harley does some complicated gymnastic maneuver over the edge and _slides_ down. Floyd’s so grateful she’s wearing pants and her jacket — the idea of the rope burn and road rash she would have gotten from the wall doing that stunt in fishnets makes his skin tingle in sympathetic pain.

“Whoo!” she says when she lands, brushing her hands off briskly. “Well, are we gonna stand around waiting for the bad guys to repent their ways, or are we gonna go be _worse_ guys?”

Waylon and Digger laugh at that, but Floyd’s too tense to laugh. Apparently Flag shares that opinion, because he just snorts and directs them into the building. 

It must have been a subway stop at some point, but it’s obviously been refurbished multiple times, and one of those times knocked out the actual stairs. The entrance to the old tunnels is a gaping hole in the floor. Flag shines a light down and the dark seems a physical substance, thick and viscous. The tracks are just visible, smears of shadow in a pit that’s nothing but.

They arrange themselves in a ring around the hole, so they can all stare down, vision unimpeded. A hundred responses press on the back of Floyd’s tongue — _you’ve got to be kidding me, you want us to go there?, that’s a pit full of nightmares right there, maybe Chato should light it up,_ on and on they go, disbelief mixed with fear. But he can’t speak, the darkness is so oppressive. Zoe’s probably not down there, but a lot of other girls absolutely are, and even if he doesn’t know or care about them personally, the thought is so repugnant he can barely breathe. 

“Shine it some more,” Harley says, and her voice cuts through the mood. Floyd startles a little, and he’s not the only one. “I wanna see what the landing’s like.”

Flag obliges, moving the pitiful beam of light more slowly over the bottom of the pit. It’s at least fifteen feet, maybe more. It’s hard to tell, it’s so dark. The tracks. Some rubble, but not stacked high enough to let them drop down slowly, just enough to make a landing more dangerous if they jump. Whatever Harley sees, she nods. “Think that third rail’s off?” she asks. Without waiting for an answer, she crouches, grabs the edge, lowers her body, slowly, controlled, then drops. She lands on her feet, but immediately pitches forward into a roll. Flag tries to follow her with the light, but she disappears all the same.

Floyd gets ready to jump after her. He trusts her, but there’s something about this whole situation that has him so on edge he can barely think. She walks back into the light. “Weather’s great down here, guys!”

Floyd hears Flag release his breath in a gust. “Crazy girl,” he mutters, but it’s tempered with fondness. “Waylon—“ He hesitates, then plows on. “You jump down and catch everyone as they jump.”

Waylon can’t make the same expressions of disbelief as most people. For one, his face isn’t as mobile as normal skin. For another, he doesn’t have eyebrows. Somehow, though, he manages to communicate both that he can’t believe what he’s hearing _and_ that he’s kind of insulted by it, all without saying a word. Floyd’s already trying to figure out how to get down by himself, because there’s no way he’s making that landing the way Harley did, when Waylon shrugs and walks off the edge.

He lands with a thud that throws up dust. Harley lets out a small _whoop_ that’s almost swallowed up by the darkness.

Floyd looks around at the Squad still up top. Everyone’s looking wild-eyed except Katana, and she might be too, he can’t tell with the mask. “Well,” says Digger after a painfully long pause as they all waited for someone else to break first. “Well, Way, you know how much I like being cradled in your arms.” He circles around so he’s closer to where Waylon stands below. “I always feel so secure. Safe, really.” Waylon grunts, holds his arms out. Digger jumps, and only screams a very little bit before Waylon catches him.

After that, they move pretty fast. Katana chooses to mimic Harley, rather than be caught. But Waylon does well, even if it’s a sickening moment in free fall. Floyd trusts his team at this point, he does. Or he trusts them as much as he’s ever trusted anyone, which is to say, not a whole lot. He’s spent most of his adult life avoiding attachment, after all. That’s a hard thing to just put aside.

Once they’re on the ground, there’s another problem. The tunnel goes both ways.

Now, the Squad does a lot of stupid shit. It’s kind of the whole point. But splitting up when they’re expecting to run into a superior force that’s expecting them? That’s beyond stupid. It’s, ha, _suicide_.

Luckily, Flag agrees. Or at least doesn’t split them up. Instead, he turns to Harley. “You know enough about the Joker or the tunnels to get us where we need to be?”

“We wanna head west and north.” She checks her gun. “Watch your step.” She starts to take a step, then stops. “Which way is west?”

If they were outside, Floyd would be able to tell. As it is, he’s as lost as she is. There’s a low murmur as everyone realizes that they’re equally disoriented. Everyone looks at Waylon. He shakes his head. Embarrassingly, Flag has to check on his phone. It takes a while, and Harley starts exploring, using Flag’s flashlight. Floyd didn’t see her take it.

Before the GPS finishes thinking, Harley’s laugh echoes back through the tunnel. “Guys,” she calls, “check it out.”

Floyd shrugs and goes towards the light. When he gets closer, he can tell what she’s shining it on — not just another pile of rubble, but dog-mask, crushed by it. “Good catch,” he tells her. “This way! Walk on the rail!”

Everyone clusters around the body. Flag crouches. “Looks like he pulled a tripwire. Guess you were serious about the traps.”

“Deadly,” she says, and snickers.

 

They walk for what seems like forever. The air gets damper the farther in they get. There’s an occasional cold breeze, never from any holes they can see. If looking into the darkness was oppressive, walking through it is suffocating. Water drips from the ceiling irregularly. In front of him, Harley coils tighter and tighter into herself. There’s a lot of traps, but there’s a tendency for them to count on the gloom to hide them. Without a pursuer hurrying them, it’s easy enough to avoid them.

The quality of the darkness shifts towards gray almost imperceptibly at first, then faster. There’s sound, too, that isn’t the fall of their own feet, or the dripping of water. Yelling, crying, and then, cutting through it all, the grating cadence of the Joker’s speech. Floyd doesn’t listen to the words, just registers the way it rises and falls and pauses at all the wrong places. It doesn’t sound like he’s upset, as much as Floyd can tell anything about the Joker’s emotional state. It doesn’t sound like they’ve been spotted anyway. Which is strange — why doesn’t he have lookouts?

Harley makes a noise in the back of her throat. When Flag looks at her, she points up — a camera blinks down at them. The light hadn’t stood out, since it’s not pitch black anymore.

Oh. The Joker sounds _happy_. He wants them here. The seven of them are about to enter a killbox. He won’t ever get to see Zoe grow up.

No. His resolve hardens. He won’t die here, not today, not because of this asshole and his tacky gimmicks.

“Hit the walls,” Flag says, waving them to the sides of the tunnel. “Harley, he wants you alive. Take lead.”

She shows him her teeth, and Floyd has the urge to do the same. Still, she moves to the front. Floyd follows, stays on her six.

After another quarter mile, the tunnel opens up into what must have been the Subway Center. Harley strides forward with a look Floyd doesn’t like. She vaults onto the subway platform smoothly. “Hey, Puddin, I’m home!”

At her heels, though his vault is less graceful, Floyd sees as the crowd — at least ten times as many as the Squad, about half dressed as the Joker usually makes his men dress and the rest obviously co-opted from the various mob families — turns to look at her. The Joker is standing above them all on the decaying hull of a train. He throws his arms into the air, face twisting into a garish bearing of teeth that Floyd supposes is meant to be a smile.

“Darlin’, Harley Girl, Pumpkin Pie, I thought you’d never come!”

The mass of people starts to move towards the tunnel and without looking away from the Joker, Harley cracks her bat against the face of the closest one. “Oh, Puddin’, how could I stay away when you sent me such a nice invitation? Sally-boy sends his regards!”

The only saving grace of this situation, as the Joker creaks out a laugh, is that the crowd isn’t drawing guns. They have them, this time, but as Floyd shoots one in the head, no one more than twitches towards them. “Oh, Harley Girl,” he says, and jumps from the roof of the train into the crowd and promptly disappears. Floyd didn’t know there was a place in the world that a white guy with green hair and grills could disappear, but he also didn’t count on ever seeing so much bad taste in one room. From the crowd rises the Joker’s voice. “I _missed_ you, darlin’.”

Harley’s surrounded and the rest of the Squad is out of the tunnel and on the platform. Over the crack of gunfire and screams of pain, Floyd hears her snarl, almost to herself, “Well, the feeling wasn’t mutual, jackass.”

He smiles to himself as he shoots and shoots, and tries to get to better ground. He wants to be higher, where he can observe the ebb and shift of the fight, where he can keep an eye on his Squad. And where he might be able to see where the girls are being kept.

People die so easily, compared to the things he normally has to fight with the Squad. Easier than radioactive slime monsters to maneuver around, too. So when the arm locks around his throat and he’s dragged back onto the tracks, he’s surprised. But really, it figured. Things were going too easily.

His wrist guns are empty — stupid —, but he jams one back into the gut of the man holding him and fires anyway, just in case. Click.

The laughter that fills his ear is familiar, and horrifying. Dread curls around his tongue.

“I see why she likes you,” the Joker hisses into his ear. “Such _spirit_.” He’s surprisingly strong, for such a skinny guy, and Floyd’s never been great at close quarters. He tries to yank the Joker’s arm from his throat before he blacks out, but his vision is graying already, and the Joker doesn’t even seem to notice the fingers digging into his arm. “Do you like her? My _masterpiece_. A bit _boring_ , sometimes, it’s true, but always there when I want her. Or she was.” He clucks like Goddamn suburban PTA mom.

If Floyd weren’t about to pass out, he’d roll his eyes. Even as it is, he gives it a try.

The Joker doesn’t seem to know how to shut up, even as he forces — helps, honestly, as faint as he’s getting — Floyd to his knees. “Did you _fuck_ her before or after she refused to come with me? Do you like being where I’ve been? Isn’t her pussy _swee—_ “

The crack of a gun cuts him off, and his arm sags loose of Floyd’s neck. Floyd gasps for breath on his hands and knees for a second, and when his vision is back, he looks up to see Harley staring down at him. It takes him a moment to read her expression, then it clicks. Concern. He gives her a thumbs up and she turns back to the battle while he finishes catching his breath.

When he stands, he sees the Joker laying on the ground, a neat hole in the side of his head, blood pooling. Floyd grimaces and squats, reloading his wrist guns. He should know better than to shoot till empty. He does know better.

He checks for a pulse. What there is is fading fast, but the Joker seems like the kind of cockroach that doesn’t know how to stay down, so he puts another bullet through his brain, and two in his chest.

With that done, he rubs his throat and pulls himself back up onto the platform. There’s significantly fewer people in masks than when he went down. A lot of them are on the ground, but Floyd’s better at math than anyone he’s ever met, and the number’s he’s seeing are not equal to earlier. Some of them must have fled without the Joker to keep them corralled.

Watching the Squad cut through the remaining like a bullet through Jello, Floyd’s just surprised more haven’t run. Whatever. With a shrug, he makes his way to the top of the train and starts to pick off anyone that seems like they might successfully hurt his friends.

The first guy to figure out that without the Joker, they don’t need to keep the Squad alive dies before anyone else can notice he pulled a gun. But the mob is a third its original number, and there’s no stopping a desperate man from using all the tools available to him.

It gets louder. And bloodier. Harley gets clipped, a furrow opening on her temple and blood pouring thickly down her face. Digger gets a bullet in the thigh and Katana has to drag him back to the shelter of the tunnel.

When that happens, Chato finally emerges — the Squad melts back behind him, Floyd picking off anyone that might prevent that — his face twisted with distaste and unhappiness.

The world bursts into flame. Floyd’s not sure what’s louder: the crackle of Chato’s flame, or the screams of the burning men. Methodically, he picks off everyone remaining. Kinder than letting them burn to death.

After a last sweeping glance to make sure he didn’t miss anything, Floyd slides down from the train and walks over to Chato. He claps a hand on Chato’s shoulder, makes Chato turn and walk back to the tunnel with him. “Don’t look at ‘em, man.”

“El Diablo rises again.” Chato’s voice is thick with self-loathing.

“Hey,” says Floyd. “So he does. And keeps Captain Boomerang from falling.”

When they get to the tunnel he turns to Flag to make sure that’s true. As the only person with any sort of battlefield medicine training, Flag is the _de facto_ medic, a job he’s entirely unsuited for. Still, it’s better than nothing. “He gonna be okay?”

“Well, it didn’t hit a big artery or vein, so he’s not gonna die before we get back to Belle Reve.”

“Oi,” says Digger. “I am _right_ here, and I am going to be _fine_ , you absolute cockwipe.”

“There you have,” Flag says dryly. “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”

As he crouches to talk to Digger, there’s a thump behind them. Floyd whirls, ready to shoot, and sees a familiar set of ears. He pulls the trigger without pause, but Flag’s shoved his arm so the shot goes wide.

With the extra second, he can tell that _this_ Bat isn’t the one that put him in prison. The jaw is different, the shoulders a little narrower, even with the bulk of the suit.

When he says, “I wouldn’t, Deadshot. Waller’s got her finger on the trigger if anything happens to me,” the voice is different too.

Still, Floyd’s spent a lot of nights dreaming about shattering that mask with bullet after bullet. Flag has to force his arm down.

“Hold your fire, Lawton,” he says in his officer voice. Unfortunately for him, Floyd was never in the military. Floyd maintains eye contact with this new Bat for a long, long moment. The eyes are a different color, too. He lowers his weapon.

“I’m not here for you,” the new Bat reassures them. He obviously isn’t practiced in holding a changed voice. The pitch wavers a little, the gravel slips. “I’m here to help the victims, that’s all.”

Still, he glances down at the bodies, some still smoldering. His mouth tightens. Where did the Bat find this kid? It shouldn’t be this easy to read his face.

Deliberately, Floyd turns his back on this fresh faced kid wearing a suit too heavy for him. He crouches next to Digger, talks to him a little, holds Harley’s face in his hands and starts to scrub blood from her face. He searches her eyes. She meets his gaze easily.

He’d ask how she’s doing, but — not with this Bat 2.0 in the room. Never show an enemy weakness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was very, very hard to write for a variety of reasons. The biggest was trying to avoid playing into racist tropes. If I have fumbled, please let me know, and I will do my best to fix it. 
> 
> The next two chapters will be much lighter in tone, and after that I think "sudden moves" will be limited to oneshots. Feel free to request things or talk headcanon with me on my [tumblr](http://www.alamorn.tumblr.com)!


	6. Chapter 6

Harley is absolutely, without a doubt, concussed. She has a headache fit to split, she’s nauseous, her ears are ringing, and she’s having a lot of trouble concentrating when Floyd talks to her.

Floyd. He’s safe. J had tried to hurt him, and she stopped him. Stopped J, not Floyd. Floyd’s still here. She smiles dopily at him, gives him a big kiss on the cheek when he furrows his brows at her. Floyd’s a good guy. A good guy that she loves, and that loves her. You ever been in love?

She asked him that once and he lied. She’s not gonna ask again, because it would hurt a lot more if he lied now. Besides, she knows the answer. She knows how he looks at her.

“Harley, _Harley_ , pay attention.” He snaps his fingers in her face, which, rude. But she makes herself listen to him past the ringing in her ears. Tinn— tinut — ringing. It’s annoying. “Harley, we’re gonna split up and look for the girls now. You with us?”

When she takes a moment to put her words together — her tongue feels heavy and thick — he looks at Flag. “I think she should stay with Digger, here.”

“What, no! I’m totally fine,” she protests. By the looks on everyone’s faces, she’s not totally convincing.

“Boomerang, don’t…let her wander off,” Flag says after a moment. He looks constipated, which is generally how he looks when he’s having an emotion. Flag’s having an emotion about her, ha! She giggles helplessly.

“Right,” Digger says. “I see where you’re coming from, but I do have a hole in my leg right now. I don’t know how you think I’m gonna stop her.”

Flag makes that face that says he would be doing something really undignified, like sucking his teeth, if he weren’t such a good soldier. “Quinn — Harley,” he says, sounding pained. Harley giggles again. “Stay put for a few minutes okay? Keep an eye on each other.”

She salutes, pretty snappily, for her. “Sir, yes, sir!” she chirps. Flag and Floyd shudder in unison. Even disoriented as she is, she takes a lot of pleasure in seeing their matching looks of horror when they realize what just happened.

She watches them stalk off in separate directions like offended cats with a smug grin, biting her lip. Digger looks over at her and snorts, before folding his hands behind his head and making himself comfortable against the wall.

“You’re really something else,” he tells her with a fond smile.

“Huh?” she says, to make him laugh. When he does, she grins and sits beside him, so their shoulders are pressed firmly together. It’s nice to have the warmth of another person instead of just the cold of the old subway tile.

“I’m glad I got to know to you, Quinn,” he says.

She makes a face at him, but not a big one. No point in getting her head bleeding again. “Don’t go getting sappy on me just because you nearly died, Harkness!”

“I’m not the one that got shot in the head.”

“You’re brain’s too small for even Floyd to hit, don’t you worry,” she says, and pats his shoulder. “And it was just a graze. ‘M fine.”

“Keep talking like that and even our friendship won’t save you,” he says without heat.

She laughs, staring at the gloomy ceiling. There’s a lot of things she could say now, some more true than others. But her tongue feels heavy and velvety, and she’s pretty sure Digger knows anyway.

 

She loses some time, but Digger shakes her whenever she starts to drift off to sleep. She snaps at him without anger each time. It’s still novel, still sweet, to have someone to worry about her.

 

The next time she’s shaken from her drifting, Floyd’s crouching in front of her, looking tired and tender.

“Y’ find the girls?” she mumbles.

“Yeah, yeah, we did. The cape’s getting them home, so we get to get out of here.”

“Thas good,” she says, blinking seriously at him.

“You need help up?” He holds his hand out so she can grab it and let him lever her up. She doesn’t really need to, mild dizziness notwithstanding, but she likes that he offers, so she takes his hand.

They don’t return to the Wayne Industries building where they landed. Digger could probably make it, if he needed to, or at least would consent to being carried by Waylon, but with the head cut off Gotham’s criminal underground, there’s no hurry. Flag calls in a pick up, a couple Jeeps to ferry them far enough out of the city to be picked up by a helicopter.

Harley’s feeling out of it and agreeable, enjoying the way Floyd’s touching her hands, arms, waist, as if to make sure she’s still there, still with him, so when he hands her into one of the cars and then turns to face Flag, she just tilts her head to watch.

“I’m not leaving Gotham without seeing my little girl.”

Flag looks unsurprised, as far as Harley can tell from this angle. “You know we need time to set up a visit.”

“If you think I’m flying to Belle Reve and back to see my kid—“

Flag interrupts him with a hand and a soothing tone. “I didn’t say that. We do have to call your ex and get a group together for security, so you can’t go see her right now, but we finished way ahead of schedule. I think I can swing putting you in a hotel with a guard for a day while I get it set up.”

Floyd kind of pulls his head back, surprised. Then, “I want a longer visit this time.”

“Yeah, yeah. I can give you three days.” A wry smile. “If you ask for more, I’ve been told to remind you about the bomb in your neck.”

She watches Floyd blink. His eyelashes are long and beautiful. She wants to press kisses to his eyelids. She nearly misses what he says next.

This is delivered hesitantly, no tone of demand like asking about time. “Can Harley come?”

She sits bolt upright, staring wide eyed at him. Flag glances at her and back to Floyd. He sighs.

“I’ll have to talk to the boss, but if she wants to…”

It takes Harley a moment to realize they’re waiting for an answer. Floyd looks almost like he’s about to sprint in the opposite direction. Flag looks like he’s aware of the weight of the moment, but mostly like he wants to sleep for a week and is kind of annoyed that this is stopping that from happening.

“Yes!” She lunges sloppily out of her seat towards Floyd. He catches her with an, “Oof!”

“Of course! Can I give her presents? What does she like? What’s her favorite col—“

“Quinn! Not the time!” There’s no sting in Flag’s voice, just a fond weariness. She grins at him and Floyd heaves her back into the Jeep, clambering in behind her.

She leans against him, fingers intertwined. Flag slams the door and hops in the front, sitting shotgun. “Oh,” he says. “And Quinn has to get that head wound checked out before she does anything else.”

 

It’s not until she’s sitting in a cheap motel room bathtub, thick gauze taped over her temple that she realizes that J’s dead. Really dead. The shot was a good one, and Floyd’s a careful guy. If somehow, a headshot hadn’t killed him, Floyd would have finished the job.

She’s almost surprised at how little she feels about it. There’s a small measure of relief — she hadn’t known how afraid of J she still was until they got to Gotham, but there’s no grief, no regret.

That’s not quite true. There’s the grief for the time she spent with him. The niggling feeling that she could have fixed him, could have fixed their relationship that never quite left her has been quieted. She allows herself a moment to mourn for the woman she was before she met him, for the man she thought he was.

Still, she’s remarkably unaffected, considering. Harley considers that. She may not be the girl who went through years of psychology classes anymore, but she still has the knowledge.

She didn’t need to kill him to be happy, she realizes. She feels _safer_ , knowing he’s not out there anymore, but she didn’t need to. She _loves_ Floyd. And she knows he’ll never hurt her. She can’t say she’s _happy_ living in a prison, with a bomb in her neck, but she’s not exactly _unhappy_ , either. Which is an interesting realization.

She draws her knees to her chest and rests her chin on them. She is warm, and clean, and in love. The grin bursts onto her face without thought. Tomorrow, she’s going to meet Zoe.

She’s sure she’ll love Zoe as much as she loves Floyd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure I'm happy with this, but I figure you guys have waited long enough for it. Only the epilogue left, now!
> 
> If you're not following me on [tumblr](http://alamorn.tumblr.com) I did a few prompt fills this past week while I was out of town and didn't want to do "serious" writing.
> 
> There's a couple that take place in an [alternate](https://alamorn.tumblr.com/post/152137451167/i-have-another-prompt-harley-has-a-nightmare-and) [version](https://alamorn.tumblr.com/post/152035479982/floyd-and-harley-have-an-argument-your-choice) of this fic where they don't make up after the first argument in people.
> 
> And there's a couple that take place in the normal version: [when the Squad realizes they're together](https://alamorn.tumblr.com/post/151992099722/ooh-i-have-a-quinnshot-prompt-request-thingy), and [some straight up porn for those of you that like such things.](https://alamorn.tumblr.com/post/151944617857/quinnshot-prompt-harley-lets-floyd-go-down-on-her)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: this chapter has a character becoming triggered during sex. It is dealt with quickly and promptly and the sex ceases immediately.
> 
> Also this chapter is mostly sex, and if you follow me on tumblr you've seen large parts of it. If you don't care for that sort of thing, or just don't want to read it again, there is family fluff at the beginning and the end, in the first two and last two sections.

Floyd is not a man who tries overmuch to be in touch with his emotions. In fact, he tries to ignore that he has any, as often as he possibly can. Admittedly, Harley has thrown more than a wrench in the way he normally works. A truck, maybe, smashing through his finely tuned coping mechanisms and thought processes.

But he’s focusing on this stupid metaphor so that he doesn’t have to focus on the fact that Harley is standing with him outside of Zoe’s apartment. And yeah, there’s about twenty armed guards just around the corner, and Flag is lurking just behind him, but this is a big step. A huge step. She’s about to meet Zoe. On purpose. And by his request. And he’s about to spend three nights put up in the same motel with her.

His palms are sweaty. And he feels a little like throwing up.

Harley looks up at him. “Are you gonna knock, or does she…?”

He knocks before she can figure out a way to finish the question. Then he scrubs his palms against his pants. He kind of wants to hold her hand, but even if his ex-wife isn’t here, that seems — tacky? Emotionally vulnerable? He can feel his shoulders climbing up around his ears, but he can’t seem to bring them back down.

Harley keeps glancing up at him, a little concerned, a little amused.

Before he can talk himself the rest of the way into a panic attack, the door flies open and Zoe crashes into him, shrieking, “Daddy!” in a pitch only twelve year old girls can achieve.

He melts into her. She’s grown, of course, and she’s wearing some terrible vanilla perfume, but she’s still his little girl. He holds her too tight, breathing in her hair and memorizing the feel of her under his hands.

Too soon, she pulls away. Not far. She keeps her arm around his waist, and his around her shoulder, but she looks Harley straight in the eye and says, “ _Dad_ , introduce us,” while pinching him.

Harley’s face does something complicated and lands on a small, genuine smile.

“Zoe—“ Floyd coughs, feeling awkward. “This is Harley. Harley, this is Zoe.”

“Like Harley _Quinn_?” Zoe says.

Harley pouts, hands on hips. “Oh man, what gave it away? The hair? The tattoos?”

“The armed guard?” Zoe’s got the cheeky look she gets when she nettles him about his career choice. It says, _I know what you do_. It says, _I’ll give you a chance anyway_.

Harley snaps her fingers. “Knew there had to be something.”

Zoe smiles and pulls Floyd inside. He gestures Harley in behind him and she slams the door in Flag’s face.

 

Harley’s good with kids. She’d told him that, but he hadn’t quite believed her. But she is. Zoe’s immediately taken with her. And Zoe won’t leave his side, is always within arms reach so she can touch his arm, his hand, pinch his side, whenever she wants, but her body is turned so she can chatter away with Harley, as if they’re old friends.

As if they’re a normal family.

There’s a warmth in his chest, growing slowly and steadily. His two favorite people are in the same room, and they like each other. It’s almost too good to believe. He keeps catching himself smiling helplessly, overwhelmed with love.

Then Harley goes to the bathroom.

Immediately, Zoe wheels on him. “How long have you been together? Why didn’t you tell me? She seems really nice, is she really as crazy as the news says?”

“Whoa, give a man a minute to breathe.” He laughs a little, under his breath. “Almost a year. It’s not the sort of thing I wanted to put in a letter. Didn’t want the guards knowing more than they had to. Harley’s…she sees the world differently. Everything she does has a reason, but not always a reason you or I would come up with.”

“Are you gonna marry her?”

A horrifying enough question on its own, it gets immeasurably worse when Harley chimes in from behind him. “Yeah, biscuit, you gonna make me an honest woman?”

Since the floor isn’t opening up to swallow him, Floyd puts on a brave face. “Harley, doll face, chickadee, if a ring could make you honest, the Wall would have married you herself.”

That startles a laugh out of her, a short, sharp, “Ha!”

Zoe looks amused, in a loving, tolerant, not-in-on-the-joke kind of way.

 

When Flag forces them out of the apartment and back to the hotel, Floyd’s tired, but in a good way. He feels full up with happiness. And that’s even before Harley sneaks into his hotel room with a keycard she filched from housekeeping.

He’s laying on the bed flipping channels when she slides in through the door. He nearly throws the remote at her before he realizes who it is, and her sly smile does nothing to calm his jackrabbit heart.

“Hey, biscuit,” she says. Walking’s not the right word for what she’s doing. There’s too much sway in her hips. Saunter. Prowl. Whatever it is, blood is already rushing south. “I figured we could get really kinky and do it in a bed for once. You know, while we have the opportunity.”

She reaches the bed and slowly crawls up it towards him. He goes from hardening to hard remarkably fast.

When she reaches the top of the bed, she hovers over him, grinning, until he reaches up and pulls her down into a kiss. She’s in a particular mood tonight, nipping and pulling away, darting back in for more. It’s quick and pleasant, but completely unsatisfying.

After she pulls away another time, he growls and flips them over, settling between her legs to lazily rut against the heat of her cunt as he kisses her deeply and thoroughly. She allows it for a moment, then flips them again.

This time, she straddles his hips, circling her own almost absentmindedly. Her hands are warm, splayed across his lower abdomen, and her mouth is too far away. “I wanna blow your mind tonight.”

It takes him a moment to process what she’s said, because her hips are just a little higher than he’d like, only grazing his cock on each pass, and it’s _very_ distracting. “Oh?” he eventually manages. “That sounds…acceptable. Except.” He runs a hand from her ankle up her calf, her thigh, her ass, her waist, to cup a breast and stroke his thumb over the place he knows her nipple is, under her shirt. “I’m in a very giving mood tonight.”

She takes his hand and brings it up to her face, pulls his thumb into her mouth. Her eyes are dark as she swirls her tongue around the pad and knuckle. Then she straightens her back so it slides out with a pop. He swipes the pad affectionately over her bottom lip, then puts that hand back on her thigh, tracing over a spot he knows she likes.

“I’d like to suggest a compromise,” she says, voice deep and husky.

Again, it takes him a moment to figure out what she means. When he does, his hips jerk up into her of their own accord.

“Is that a yes?” She’d pass for amused better if she weren’t so turned on, but her pupils are huge, and he can already smell her cunt. She must be dripping. He’ll find out soon.

It’s a pleasant thought. But she’s still waiting for an answer, so he hisses, “Yes.”

She tries to grin, but just lets out a breathy laugh instead. Then she swings her leg off him and stands by the side of the bed. When her hands go for the hem of her shirt, he starts to pull his own off. He does take a moment to appreciate her smooth skin, the way the muscles in her stomach and shoulders move as she strips.

It’s practical, rather than titillating, so he shimmies out of his own clothes as fast as he can. The idea that she can’t wait to get started is just as arousing as any striptease, anyway.

When she’s done, he moves down the bed a little so there won’t be a pillow bunched uncomfortably under his head. Then she turns — the flare of her waist into her ass makes him want to write poetry — and straddles him again. She starts with her knees on either side of his chest, which stretches her wide. As delightful a view as it is, it doesn’t get either of them where they want to be, so he grabs her hips and guides her back.

She _is_ dripping. Mouthwatering. It’s a bit of an awkward shuffle getting into position, but then she bends forward — breasts brushing his lower stomach, breath hot on his dick and thighs — and takes him into her mouth. He shudders out a breath and licks up into her heat.

No cunt ever tastes _good,_ necessarily. He doesn’t dislike the taste, but he likes eating pussy because he likes to make his partners happy, not out of any particular love of the act. Harley’s responsiveness is beautiful to behold.

When he tongues her clit, she trembles. When he thrusts his tongue into her opening, she has to take her mouth off him and rest her forehead against his thigh and make helpless whimpering noises. She pumps at his cock with a sweat slick hand when that happens, but honestly, he’d be okay if she forgot entirely.

Knowing that he’s making her lose her mind is pretty damn good all by itself.

She seems to take offense at the idea that he might be better at oral than she is, because when he switches focus, she takes his dick so deeply in her mouth that he has to moan. She doesn’t deep throat him, and he’d never ask. Besides, her tongue is so clever he hardly even notices the things she won’t do.

She comes first, because she has to keep stopping to tremble and make helpless noises against him. It's charming, and it keeps her teeth from snapping on his dick, so he likes it. When she comes, her whole body jerks and shakes and she loses control of her limbs, dropping her weight entirely on him. There’s worse ways to die than to be suffocated by your girlfriend’s cunt, but he shifts her hips down an inch anyway.

When she’s done shaking, she looks over her shoulder at him and gives him a pleased grin. Then, instead of finishing what she started, she scrambles off the bed and goes to her pants.

“Wait,” he says, confused and so hard he can’t think.

She pulls something from her pocket and flashes it at him, dropping her pants and clambering back onto the bed. A condom.

“Where’d you get that?” he asks as she opens the packet and rolls the condom over his dick.

“I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’m a pretty good thief.”

“I might know something about that.”

She slings a leg over his, shifts her weight so she’s hovering over his cock. Her hand is tight around the base of him. She teases the tip of his cock against her folds. It slips easily in her wetness and his awareness closes down to that point of contact.

So when she doesn’t sink down, he forcibly pulls his attention from his dick to her face. She’s biting her lip, her eyebrows furrowed. It’s not a good face. Worried. “Hey,” he says, and has to swallow. His mouth is dry. “Hey, we don’t have to.”

“I want to.” Her eyes search his. “I think I want to. I trust you. I…I love you.”

He stops breathing for a moment, then takes hold of her hips — she tenses — and shifts her back so she’s sitting on his thighs, his cock bobbing between them. If they talk too long, he might go soft, but there’s worse things. He can always jerk off in the shower.

“Harley,” he says, and waits for her to meet his gaze again. “I love you too. And I’ll love you no matter whether we do this or not.”

“This?” she asks. He can’t tell whether her tone is teasing or probing, but he decides to assume she’s serious. Easier to recover from than the other way.

“You know. Penetration. Sex in general. I mean, I love getting off with you. I love eating you out. I love smelling your pussy on my fingers when I go back to my cell. But.” He takes a moment to commit to what he’s about to say. “But I’ll still love you if we never do anything naked ever again. Or partially naked. You know what I mean.”

Her eyes are bright with tears. She blinks hard, lip trembling, then nods, shifts, and sinks down on him, taking him smoothly all the way down.

Before he can enjoy it — hot, wet, tight — she makes a horrible noise, a croaky wretched moan that he’s never heard from her before. Not during sex, not during a fight. It sounds dragged out of her, and she freezes completely, nails digging into his stomach.

He rolls them and pulls out immediately, gets off her entirely, erection wilting faster than he thought possible. He frames her face with his hands, thumbs stroking the thin skin under her eyes. “Harley, Harley, talk to me. What do you need? What can I do?”

There’s a moment of utter stillness, his stomach twisting and sinking, before she sobs, drawing her knees to her chest and clutching at him. One of her hands curls around the back of his neck, the other scrabbles at the skin of his chest. The fingers on that hand flex and dig into his skin until she flattens her palm over his heart. She burrows her head into the nook between neck and shoulder.

Her tears are hot on his skin. Still and naked, the motel is over-air conditioned. His sweat is cooling fast, gooseflesh rippling up. The duvet cover is scratchy under him. All of that pales in comparison to the woman shuddering against his chest.

He wraps his arms more securely around her and rocks her back and forth as gently as he can. Slowly, slowly, she unwinds, sliding her legs down his own and winding them together. The rasp of skin against skin seems to ground her, because she presses herself fully against him, toes to collarbones.

After a while like that, she’s breathing normally again, and the fingers on the back of his neck are tracing tiny circles on his skin.

“You want some water?” he asks her and she laughs a little, quietly.

“You’re too good to me.” She keeps her head buried in his shoulder when she says it, but he pulls back and makes her look him in the eye.

“I’m no such thing. You’re not a burden, Harley.”

Her lip trembles for a moment, then she rolls her eyes. “You’re a big softie. Well? Where’s my water?”

He smiles and lets her pull back. Harley doesn’t take well to being pushed even when she’s not so emotional. He’s not going to say he respects her boundaries in one place and then disrespect them in another area. That would be missing the point. So he drops a kiss on her forehead, and gets up and grabs a paper cup from the top of the mini-fridge and pads to the bathroom to fill it.

He tosses the condom while he’s there.

When he comes back out, she’s sitting against the wall, the blankets pooled around her waist. He passes her the cup. There’s a peculiar quality to the quiet. The rattle of pipes from the next room over, the stiff swish of the cheap duvet against itself, his own breathing. It all feels very fragile and nebulous.

He thinks of sitting on the edge of the bed and decides against it. It’s almost hard to talk, like saying something will make this moment more solid. “Do you need anything else?”

She looks up at him and down again at her cup. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m gonna take a shower then. You gonna be here when I get out?”

“I’ll let you know when I decide.”

 

He’s thumping his head gently agains the wall of the shower when he hears the curtain slither open. He jumps, even though he half expected her to join him, which is. Embarrassing. But at least he lands well.

She’s staring frankly at him when he turns to look at her, so he returns the favor. They haven’t gotten to really take their time with each other before tonight, and while he’s known she was a beautiful woman since she stripped in front of a yard full of soldiers and he couldn’t keep his eyes from the smooth planes of her stomach, the way the muscles in her thighs and shoulders shifted under her skin, it's another thing entirely to know he gets to touch every inch of that soft skin.

Her eyes are appraising, appreciative, not the wary, overwhelmed look of earlier, so he relaxes and lets her look. Her face as she looks him over is far more interesting than the rest of her. Her tits are always great, but her jaw doesn’t flex like that every day.

To try and get the muscle to jump like that again, he shifts so the water runs over his shoulders and drips down the ridges of his abs. Her mouth twitches up at the corner and she raises her eyebrows for a second, but then her gaze hits his cock.

She licks her lips, and oh, there’s his erection again. Tonight wasn’t the first time she went down on him, but he could count the amount of times it’s happened on one hand. The idea that the night’s _not_ actually over is. Well. He’s more than half hard already, and she hasn’t done anything but look at him.

She steps into the shower and pulls the curtain closed behind her. Even though there’s space, she stands close enough that her nipples brush his chest with every breath.

Is she breathing so deeply because she’s going to have another panic attack? He tilts his head at her, says, “Harley—?”

“Don’t you worry,” she says, and goes to her knees. “Relax, biscuit.” She drops a kiss on the tip of his dick and he can’t keep himself from making a small noise, not quite a whimper or a gasp, but not anything else either. He drops a hand onto her head — he feels her tense — and he cards his fingers gently through her hair, careful not to grab or pull, just keeping his hand there so he can feel if she tenses up.

With a wicked smile that looks a little forced, she licks a hot strip from balls to tip. It pulls another noise out of him, and he leans back against the wall, which takes him out of the path of the water.

She sucks his head into her mouth and he can _feel_ the ridges on the roof of her mouth, and the firm swirl of her tongue. He groans. After the blue balls of earlier, this isn’t going to take long.

She pops off, gasping for breath and he traces her ear, overwhelmed, before realizing, “Wait, shit, can you not breathe like that? Here, let me —“ he shuffles past her to lean against the opposite wall, in the back of the shower, and she swivels on her knees to follow him, beaming up at him.

“I love you,” she says, and takes him deeper than before, one hand massaging his balls. The second time hearing it is just as powerful and startling as the first. That, combined with the heat of her mouth, the heat of the shower, makes him a little light headed.

She pulls back so just his tip is in her mouth, her tongue playing over his slit, and he stares down at her. How did he get so lucky? He spent so much of his life pretending he didn’t feel things like love, and now…

But she’s said it twice now, and both times have been while they’re naked. Is it just a heat of the moment thing? He loves her, more than he could have ever imagined when they first met, but —

She pulls off, still massaging his balls and nuzzling into the crease of his thigh to nip at him gently with his cock resting on her cheek.

“I mean it,” she says. “I do. Not just as a sex thing. I can say it again when we’ve got clothes on if you want me to.”

He drags her up by the elbows, spinning them to press her into the wall. He stares wildly into her eyes for a moment, searching for honesty. When he finds it, he kisses her so deeply he almost forgets about his throbbing dick. When he’s done, he rests his forehead against hers, breath mingling.

“I love you, too, you impossible, wonderful woman,” he says, and she beams.

“I wasn’t done, you know,” she says, turning him around again, and going back to her knees. The shower floor must hurt her knees, and the water is definitely shifting from hot to lukewarm, but Harley doesn’t seem to notice. She takes his balls in her mouth and keeps her hand pumping. She laves at him with her tongue, scatters kisses from root to tip, and sooner than he’s proud of, his balls start to tighten.

“Harley,” he says, tries to tug her away. “Harley, I’m gonna—“

She takes his head back in her mouth and sucks hard. He jerks, thumps his head against the wall, and then he’s coming in her mouth. She swallows it all down and he draws her up to kiss her with trembling hands. He licks the taste of his come out of her mouth and when they break apart, they’re both grinning and he has to drop butterfly kisses on her eyelids, the tip of her nose.

He tosses her a towel and they dry off, stumbling into each other and giggling. Then they go back to the bed and lay down together, turned towards each other and they talk.

After a while, Floyd shifts to his back and Harley sneaks in close, sliding one leg through his, pressing her chest and belly against his side, hooking her chin onto his shoulder.

“Tell me more about Zoe,” she says, and he traces a hand up her spine.

“She’s smart. Almost as good at math as I was, when I was her age. She’d be a hell of a sniper if she wanted to learn, but she’s a good person. She wants to be a doctor. Or a politician. She changes her mind every other letter. But she wants to fix things. No idea where she got that, God knows it wasn’t me or her mother.”

Her chin is pointy on his chest, and she’s smiling softly at him. “You’re a good guy, Floyd.”

He snorts and touches the side of her face, tracing her smile with his thumb. “That’s real sweet, doll face. A lie, but a sweet one.”

She nips at his thumb, then kisses it. “Think what you want, but I know you’re a good guy.”

He shrugs. He’s loose limbed and happy. There’s no point in fighting about something like this. “Her favorite movie is _Up_. She’s gonna be Tiana for Halloween. She’s the bravest person I know.” He goes quiet. He doesn’t want to tell Harley about that night, not when he still has such mixed feelings about it.

Harley’s voice is hushed. “What’d she do?”

He swallows and puts his hands behind his head. “Stood between me and the Bat while I had a gun drawn and begged me not to kill him.”

Harley doesn’t say anything, and he’s acutely aware of the drag of her skin on his own. If he’d killed the Bat that night, he wouldn’t have been in Belle Reve, and neither would she. They’d never have met, but they’d never have been imprisoned, either. Much as he loves Harley, much as he loves Zoe, he regrets not taking that shot every single day.

Finally, she says, “You should be proud. You raised a hero.”

A bitter sound that could have been a laugh escapes him. “Yeah. Just wish…” Harley’s finger is soft over his lips, and her eyes are huge and serious when he looks at her.

“Sh. Don’t think about it. We are where we are.” She undulates sinuously against his body. “And I’m pretty happy with where I am, right now.”

 

Flag sends Harley back to Belle Reve the next day, without seeing Zoe again. It sucks, but he hadn’t even expected her to be allowed to come at all. Waller could have gotten word, or maybe Flag's just nervous about having the two of them out and unattended together for such a long time.

When he gets to the apartment Zoe shares with her mom, earlier than he likes to remember exists, his ex-wife is already — still? — gone, and Zoe makes him eggs for breakfast. They’re not exactly good — a little burnt — but she’s unbearably proud of herself, so Floyd eats every bite and makes exaggerated sounds of pleasure.

“When did you become a chef?” he asks her. “Did your mama spring for cooking lessons? Where’s your hat?”

She laughs at him, and he tucks away the way her smile splits her face so he can take it out and look at it when he’s in his cell, just a little too cold and dying for the sound of another person’s voice.

He’s not allowed to take her to school, but when she gets back, she gives him a rib creaking hug and pulls her homework out.

 

Leaving Zoe never gets easier. Entering Belle Reve never gets easier. But passing Harley spinning on the sheets hung from the top of her cage makes something in his chest ease. She blows him a kiss and he winks before he’s marched out of sight.

They’ll have to talk about it, but he’s sure she won’t say no to escaping with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's a wrap, folks! sudden moves is 115 pages total, which blows my mind, since it was supposed to be a one shot. It wouldn't have gotten written without all of your kind reviews.
> 
> Tell me what worked for you and what didn't, and if you want to talk Skwad or request prompts or just hang out, feel free to head over to my [tumblr!](http://www.alamorn.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> So this is going to be a bit different than "people" but I think it'll be fun! The chapters are going to be a bit longer, so it will take me longer to get them up, but don't worry! It's all planned out. If you do worry, the best way to get me to write more is to let me know what worked and what you're wondering about. I'm very hungry for validation, haha!
> 
> I will be posting deleted scenes and snippets from "people" in Floyd's POV on my [tumblr](http://alamorn.tumblr.com). I'll be putting in the notes whether I've posted anything, and everything will be tagged "sudden moves fic" so you don't have to follow me! If you want to see anything in particular, shoot me a message on tumblr and I'll do my best, whether it gets its own ficlet or gets worked into "who you know"!


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